Apple A11 is a six core ARM based SoC that now has Apple graphics inside. Apple claims that it is 30 percent faster than the previous PowerVR GPU in the iPhone 7. Fudzilla exclusively reported about this almost two years ago, and we were right.

If you haven’t seen the pattern, ever since iPhone 4 and the introduction of Apple A4, Apple has slowly started to make in-house all the parts of the SoC in order to have a better control over the IPs (Intellectual Property). The next is modem but this will likely take some time.

If you license the GPU from Imagination technologies and get the PowerVR based graphics, there is a chance that some other competitor might do the same. This has been happening in the past as both Samsung and Apple are using the GPU IP from either Imagination Technologies or ARM. These are the two popular choices.

Apple and Samsung have a big advantage over anyone else who was not making its own SoC in house. Apple and Samsung allocate a very big area SoC that would be a tough sell for anyone who is not certain it can sell at least a few million (tens of million) of these devices.

Repeatedly Apple showed us a power to sell tens of millions of its phones and tablets using its in-house A10 and A10X SoC and we have a strong belief that this will continue with A11, but now with Apple GPU inside.

Apple stated in its PR.

„A11 Bionic also integrates an Apple-designed GPU with a three-core design that delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics performance than the previous generation”

The only thing that PhilSchiller the senior vice president of worldwide marketing revealed is that this a 3 core design, 30 percent faster than A10 and has A10 performance at half the power. This can be interpreted that the Apple designed GPU is 30 percent faster than PowerVR Series 7XT GT7600 Plus that is inside of the iPhone 7, 7 Plus. This is not a great score as the PowerVR Series 8 announced in March could easily outperform Apple.

Apple didn’t mention that A11 is 10nm, and going from 16nm to 10nm will save you a lot of power, give you a headroom for a clock increase and one is able to put much more GPU transistors

The PowerVR Series 8 codename Furian is built for new sub-14nm process geometries and according to Imagination, it GFLOPS/mm2 is improved 35% and Fill rate/mm2 is improved 80% with massive 70% to 90% gaming performance increase compared to the 7XT Plus series on the same node.

Based on these numbers if Apple uses the same size Furian GPU inside of the A11 it will more likely be faster than the Apple own GPU that is clearly behind these numbers.

Apple own GPU that remain nameless for now, is a great achievement for Apple, as having your own GPU will make you compete better against the other. Again, Apple is currently its own enemy as it will most likely cripple the sales of iPhone 8 and 8 Plus as all the fanboy will want the iPhone X rated edition.

The current generation of SoC and the one that comes after will remain at 10nm, since it will take some time to move to 7nm. This is the conclusion we gathered after talking to a number of industry insiders.

Qualcomm is at 10nm with its Snapdragon 835, Samsung has shipped the Exynos 8895 since Q2 2017 while the rest of the competition is slowly working its way into the 10nm SoC universe.

The current iPhone 7 A10 SoC is manufactured in 16nm TSMC manufacturing process while the one that comes in the new iPhone next week is the 10nm. MediaTek has the 16nm X30 SoC out and Huawei already announced that it has the Kirin 970 in 10nm, ready to debut in the P10 phone some five weeks from now.

From what our sources have been telling us, the Galaxy S9 will be powered by a 10nm SoC and it is expected that the Galaxy S8 successor will launch in early Q2 2018. 2018 will be a big year for the 7nm process, as we expect that AMD might make some GPUs in a similar timeframe.

Getting from 10nm to 7nm will enable more transistors per square millimeter, and it will reduce the power consumption of the whole device. This has always been the pinnacle of progress in the mobile industry.

Just a decade ago, the first generation iPhone used a 65nm ARM 11 based ARM1176JZF SoC and now some 10 years later the new iPhone will get a 10nm SoC. This is huge progress that enabled a lot of innovation including Gigabit LTE performance, 4K playback, 360 video as well as AR/XR performing decently on the device that sits in your pocket.

And, of course, the next generation iPhone and the Galaxy S9 and later S10 will get faster, thinner, and better, partially thanks to a second generation 10nm and later 7nm SoCs.

Sources very close to Qualcomm have confirmed that there is no such thing as the Snapdragon 836. The current generation Snapdragon will stay with the Snapdragon 835 and there won’t be any faster version

All the new phones that will launch in the fall (autumn) season this year featuring the best of Qualcomm, will have the Snapdragon 835 SoC and nothing else.

We could not get on top of things as to why the company decided to stay with the Snapdragon 835, but have in mind that we are only half year away from the next generation Snapdragon launching in Q1 2018 for the next generation phones.

Last year Qualcomm decided to launch the Snapdragon 821 which increased both CPU and GPU clock from the Snapdragon 820 by about 10 percent, but it was made clear to us that this won’t happen with 10nm based Snapdragon 835.

Sony just launched its flagship Sony Xperia XZ1 and XZ1 compact and LG its V30 all featuring the Snapdragon 835. We can say it loud and clear that the upcoming rumored Google Pixel 2 and the next One Plus phone will not have anything other than the Snapdragon 835. There is simply nothing else until the new faster SoC comes in the early part of 2018.

A few chaps are implying that Note 8 might be the first phone to have an updated and faster Snapdragon 836, but we learned that Pixel 2 is more likely the one.

This comes as hardly a surprise as Qualcomm plans to introduce the faster version of the chip and that Google wants it first. The same scenario happened last year as Pixel and Pixel XL were the first phones with the updated Snapdragon 821. The new Pixel, according to our industry friends, has a smaller chip and you can expect better quality pictures too.

Of course, Snapdragon 836 won’t be exclusive to anyone as the usual suspects such as Xiaomi and many others plan to have a refresh of the phones based on this chip. The Galaxy Note 8 is, as far as we know, going to use the Snapdragon 835.

You can expect a similar scene with the Snapdragon 836, the base clock will either change slightly or not at all, but the maximal clock speed for both GPU and CPU will increase. The result will be a slightly faster SoC with some battery life improvements.

Qualcomm had a few months to further optimize the SoC and enable slightly faster speeds at slightly lower power.

MediaTek has been quieter than usual but it seems that its Helio X30 high end chipset will debut with the Meizu 7 Pro phone.

The date is July 26 and this dual screen phone will be the first with the deca core Helio chipset. This is MediaTek’s first 10nm SoC. The Helio X30 has two Cortex A73 at 2.5 GHz for extreme performance, four Cortex A53 with 2.2 GHz clock and energy aware Cortex A35 at 1.9 GHz for better power efficiency.

Meizu 7 Pro comes with a secondary display on the back of the phone and might do well with its fanbase. Meizu is popular in China as it tends to arrive with capable optics too.

The company is now public about its launch date. It has invited its fans to watch the product launch happening on July 26 7.30 PM CST in the Zhuhai Grand Theatre. The 6 Pro was using MediaTek SoC and was one of the few phones outside iPhone to use the 3D press capable display. It was one of the high-end phones to come with MediaTek’s flagship Helio X25 processor.

It will be interesting to see how Helio X30 compares to the Snapdragon 835 competition especially the Xiaomi Mi6 phone, but I guess you will have to wait a week to see.

Qualcomm talked a bit here at the Computex show about Snapdragon 835 running Windows, and we had a chance to see a demo and chat with Qualcomm’s Don McGuire VP of product marketing and Pete Bernard, a Principal Group Program Manager partner and customer engagement R&D chap at Microsoft.

After the big overview with these two chaps and a talk with Monte Giles, Qualcomm's director of product management, and Peter Burns, senior manager of marketing, we ended up spending some time with the productivity and video demo. Yesterday we reported that Asus, HP and Lenovo announced that they are on board with the Snapdragon 835 on Windows 10.

Office 2016 that we've seen is a 32 bit version emulated, but despite the emulation it worked really well. We’ve seen a demo of an Excel data set, creating a chart and then copying it to a PowerPoint presentation. After that, the presentation was sent via email using Outlook.

Pete Bernard from Microsoft assured us that there will be a native ARM version of the Office in time to launch, but he didn’t go into the details. Office will be recompiled for the ARM instruction set, and Pete did point out that ARM set may end up being faster than the X86 instruction set. We will have to wait and see.

Pete also mentioned that Microsoft keeps track of the top hundred applications and that for the launch for Windows 10 on Snapdragon, Microsoft will make sure that these applications run smoothly through the simulation layer.

We had a chance to see 7 Zip (x86) third party app, installing and working just fine. The Edge browser runs smoothly and the demo was conducted via a GigabitLTE (test network), the heart of the Snapdragon 835. The average download speed exceeded 300 Mbps - something that you might end up seeing in the future.

Fifteen carriers / providers are working to deploy Gigabit LTE this year and all USA carriers are on board. Don McGuire pointed out that the elimination of data caps will definitely boost the popularity of always connected devices. The Z generation, he pointed out, expects that they have internet all the time and most laptops don’t have it right now. This is the market that Qualcomm wants to address with Snapdragon 835 Windows 10 machine.

Snapdragon 835 on Windows 10 aims to become a synonym for always connected laptop.

The last demo was suggested by Myriam Joire from Mobile Geeks and it included loading of multiple webpages including mobile geeks, Fudzilla and a few others. Check the whole demonstration below.

One key point that we want to leave you with is that compared to the 7th generation Core low power processors, you can expect to see Snapdragon 835 having four to five times better connected standby. Microsoft and Qualcomm expect that connected standby on this platform includes a machine that has instant on, always connected data sync and Cortana active listening for your voice. Remember, Qualcomm has a DSP that can do these things very efficiently, and enable much better battery life than a traditional X86 based PC.

Make sure you check out the video, but the first demo we’ve seen looks impressive. There might be a new sheriff in town, at least when it comes to connectivity and battery life. Emulation of course, will be the thing to watch, but Microsoft feels confident that things will run smooth. The bottom line is that with a 30 percent smaller motherboard and with up to 50 percent better battery life, you might end up having a 2 in 1 laptop with incredible battery life.

There is more information about the upcoming Snapdragon 845 as well as the Huawei Kirin 970 and we wanted to share it with you.

The next Snapdragon that is expected to be showcased this year and start shipping in early 2018 is still a 10nm LPE SoC. This makes perfect sense, as there won’t be a more advanced process than that. The leak, of course, originated in China's Mydriver website, so no surprise there.

The leak implies that Snapdragon 845 uses a combination of a yet to be announced Cortex A75 cores and a power aware cluster with four Cortex A53. We would suggest that Qualcomm plans to modify Cortex A75 architecture in order to be able to call it Kryo, but we might be wrong about that. The Cortex A75 is likely going to be optimised for more performance with lower power consumption, that is likely to be the main design direction.

As far as we know, Snapdragon 835 has a cluster with Cortex A53 that is still gets to call Kryo 280.

The company plans to use a next generation graphics called Adreno 630 - an obvious step forward and, of course, you can expect the performance will be increased, compared to the Snapdragon 835.

The new SoC comes with a new modem called the Snapdragon X20. The modem supports 5x20 MHz channels, 256 QAM modulation as well as 1.2Gbps LTE. This has a chance be the fastest integrated modem solution once it launches.

When it comes to Wi-Fi, the new SoC supports 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and ad. This is a commitment that Qualcomm started with the Snapdragon 820 and it doesn’t plan to change that. Qualcomm will end up winning a lot of Wi-Fi related benchmarks with its implementation, Fudzilla reckons. The new chipset supports UFS 2.1, 4x16 Bit LPDDR4X.

This SoC will most likely end up in most high-end Android phones that are scheduled to appear after March 2018 or, should we say, the Mobile World Congress?

The same leak implies that the Kirin 970 might launch in a Q3 / Q4 2017 timeframe. Kirin is the heart of Huawei's high end "solutions" and will come with an obvious Cortex A73 with quad Cortex A53, the same approach that MediaTek is using for its Helio X30.

The chipset uses a 5x20 MHz 256 QAM 1.2Gbps capable modem. If it launches in late 2017, it might even get to the market before Qualcomm. The Kirin 970 is an obvious choice for a Mate 9 big screen phablet phone that usually launches in September / October.

The SoC packs 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and no end of Wi-Gig present in the SoC. It also supports both UFS 2.1 and MMC as well as 4x16bit LPDDR4X. You can expect to see this one in late Q3 or early Q4 2017.

MediaTek should have its Helio X30 in the market by early Q3 with a similar core combination and so to speak, a 10nm FinFET powering a few loyal brands in China.

The first 10nm SoC announced was the Snapdragon 835 and Samsung also followed on with its own Exynos 8895. They were both manufactured in 10nm LPE (Low Power Early) process and Samsung is now getting ready to launch Low Power Plus.

This is the second generation 10nm manufacturing process, and of course it will be more mature then the first one. It also features enhancements to the 3D FinFET structure reducing the leakage between the transistors. Samsung also confirmed that it was the first company to begin mass production of system-on-chips (SoCs) products on 10LPE last October. Yes, that was the Snapdragon 835.

Samsung expects a 10 percent performance gain and a 15 percent power consumption reduction which will definitely help the next generation SoCs. One can expect that the successors of Snapdragon 835 that some call Snapdragon 845 and the next generation Exynos - let’s call it the 8900 series that targets the Galaxy S9 phone - will be manufactured using this process.

Samsung is currently installing the manufacturing equipment for the 2nd generation 10nm Low Power Plus in Hwaseong, Korea and it is expected that the first chips will leave this fab before the end of Q4 2017. This is just in time for the Galaxy S9 and other Android spring refresh phones that usually get announced in Q1 and ship in early Q2 of the year.

As you can imagine this is too late for the next generation iPhone that many call the iPhone 8, as this needs to have millions of SoCs manufactured by mid-summer this year. Therefore many expect that TSMC might be the only supplier for the A11 iPhone SoC.

“With our successful 10LPE production experience, we have commenced production of the 10LPP to maintain our leadership in the advanced-node foundry market. 10LPP will be one of our key process offerings for high performance mobile, computing and network applications, and Samsung will continue to offer the most advanced logic process technology.”

It looks like the market is more forgiving than many expected as Samsung announced that S8 pre-orders were up 30 percent compared to S7 pre-orders in 2016.

This hardly comes as a surprise as the Galaxy S8 looks like a great phone. It is offering customers what they want - a larger screen, great battery life and great performance too. It has a great wireless component and is the first commercially launched phone to support Gigabit LTE speeds as well as Bluetooth 5.0.

If is the first phone with 10nm SoC and the Americans are getting the Snapdragon 835 version of the phone with better GPU and connectivity while the Europeans are getting the Exynos 8895- again a 10nm part but with weaker ARM Mali-G71 MP20 GPU and a definitely weaker modem component.

Galaxy S7 and S7 edge were one of the best phones that launched a year ago and they enjoyed great sales. The fact that S8 has a smaller bezel, a great camera and still one of the best screens on the market, worked positively on the market. Customers forgot the pain of the burning Galaxy Note 7 fiasco and decided to trust Samsung with the new phone.

With the amount of battery testing and internal changes, Galaxy S8 is the least likely phone to catch fire, but due to the nature of Li-ion batteries we would not be surprised to see a random burning of an isolated phone during the course of its life.

Samsung is not quoting any solid numbers, it just said that pre-orders are 30 percent better and these are the US pre-orders numbers. We are quite sure that the S8 will be a popular choice in Europe too.

A lot of people failed to mention that the competition didn’t do a great job either, and that really boosted Samsung’s sale numbers. The LG G6 is a nice phone but the lack of Snapdragon 835 10nm SoC leaves it really behind the Galaxy. It is obvious that customers want the 10nm SoC to get a significant boost in GPU, CPU performance, better battery life and better connectivity including the GigabitLTE.

Xiaomi Mi6 is launching in the coming week and the most of the details about the new Snapdragon 835 based phone have been revealed.

The 5.1-inch phone has 6 GB RAM, at least for some versions, dual rear camera as well as Android 7.1.1 wrapped under MIUI user interface. Xiaomi Mi 6 looks good too, especially with its two cameras.

The latest leak comes from the popular GeekBench 4.0 where the phone scores 2006 in single and 6438 in multi-threading. Galaxy S8 powered by Snapdragon 835 scores less than 2000 in single and just above 6000 in multi-threading but it is easy to assume that Samsung wants to make its Exynos 8895 version appeal faster.

Xiaomi Mi5 was the fastest phone based on the Snapdragon 820 in AuTutu, but again, have in mind that many Chinese manufacturers tend to optimise phones to win benchmarks. In AuTutu Xiaomi Mi6 scores around 170,000 and this happened on a 4GB RAM with 64GB storage full HD phone.

Recent leak at Weibo revealed that the 4GB RAM + 64GB storage will cost 2,199 Yuan ($318 / 300 Euro) while the 4GB RAM + 128GB storage will sell at 2,599 Yuan ($376 / 355 Euro). They will cost more than two times less than the Samsung Galaxy S8.

The larger version of the phone simply called and comes with a larger 5.7-inch screen. The Xiaomi Mi6 Plus with 6GB RAM and 64GB storage will start at 2,699 Yuan ($390 / 368 Euro), the 6GB RAM with 128GB storage will sell for 3,099 Yuan ($448 / 423 Euro). The storage champion featuring 6GB RAM and 256GB storage will sell for 3,699 Yuan ($535 / 505 Euro).

We will see on Wednesday April 19 if the pricing is correct as this is the date that company launches to the press.